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Land and Territory: Meanings of Land between Modernity and Tradition

Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 1(1) 85107 2012 Centre for Agrarian Research and Education for South (CARES) SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/227797601200100106 http://ags.sagepub.com

Srgio Sauer
Abstract The recent land rush reinforces the historical struggles for land and territory in the fight for a place to dwell and work, beyond the questions of land exchange value and price. The resistance of peasants and traditional communities against processes of expropriation give rise to new theoretical challenges and perspectives in the discussion of the importance of land and territory. Along with it, recent changes in the representations of space (and time) have established new relations between the local and global dimensions, and have yielded new meanings to these historical struggles for land in connection with territorial rights. The present article seeks to understand the processes of reinventing rural space, which are taking place in the struggle for land as a place to be, to dwell and to work in the Brazilian countryside. Keywords territory, land, tradition, modernity, place, work, Brazil

Srgio Sauer is Professor in the Postgraduate Programme for the Environment and Rural Development (PPG-MADER), University of Braslia (FUP/UnB), and National Rapporteur on the Human Right to Land, Territory and Food for the Platform DhESCA Brazil.

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Introduction
News reports in the main national newspapers in Brazil show an increasing interest in the countrys land rush.1 Such reports have been tracking the increase in foreign investments in land, following the financial crisis in 2008, and the search for alternative sources of energy (agrofuels) and food. This demand for land, however, is not exclusive to the Brazilian market. It is a global trend, as a recent survey by the World Bank (2010) has shown. This land rush belies the historical discourse which claims that there is no real economic interest in investing in farmland, thus emphasizing its use and exchange value. Beyond the issue of price, the land rush raises another questionas per Harvey (1982) on the Marxian theory of rentwhich is: can the land also have value? Surely, such discussion must go beyond price, exchange value and land markets, in order to approach the meaning of land for peasants, small farmers, landless families and rural communities. Despite having the same Latin root in Portuguese, the terms land and territory have quite a different common understanding in Brazil. Without going into their etymology, suffice it to note that the expression land struggle has assumed quite a distinct meaning as a territorial right, a concept recently associated to the resistance of rural people and traditional communities against land expropriation as caused by so-called development. Land struggle, while heavily influenced by recent Brazilian history indeed, Latin American history as a wholeis closely associated with the demands and struggles of peasants, or landless peasants. The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 reinforced such understanding, as it established that land which does not fulfil its social functionmeaning only the unproductive landmust be expropriated for agrarian reform. The constitution also recognized the territorial rights of indigenous peoples and Afrodescendants of former slaves (named quilombolas), establishing a difference between territory and land, since the former must be a place of life and tradition, detached from any relation to productivity and production. The distinction between a modern means of production and a traditional use of the land was also reinforced by the modernization of agriculture. The implementation of the green revolution, beginning in the 1950s, as the model of modern agricultural developmentoften subordinated to the desire for industrialization (Bernstein 2010: 73) Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1, 1 (2012): 85107

Land and Territory 87 was based on a theoretical opposition between old-fashioned agrarian economies and modern societies. The modernization of agriculture, often called the industrialization of agriculture, was not only a matter of using chemicals and machinery; it also implied a concept of society. In such context, modernization has been seen as a process through which old and traditional agrarian societies could grow towards modern, industrialized and urban societies (Sauer 2002, 2010). This article revisits the relation between town and country in modernity, by making explicit the alleged subordination of the countryside to the town, especially by authors who see the land only as a means of production. As such, it revisits the struggles for land and territory by peasants and traditional communities as struggles for rights, especially for the right to be. Based on the view of land struggle as a spatial praxis, it proceeds to explore other meanings and values that consider the land or territory as a place of work and abundance, of life and dwelling.

Modernity, the City and Land

The development of capitalism has transformed the city into a privileged place for the location of industry, trade and services. The urban centres have become the delivery poles of goods and technology, and consequently of ideological and cultural values, thus reinforcing a dualistic distinction between town and country. Such a dichotomy suggests a logic that explains social reality, sometimes opposing these two poles, other times subordinating rural perspectives to urban values, reinforcing the Marxian perception of the social division of labour between agriculture and industry (Bernstein 2011). In the European Middle Ages, political power was based on landed property, creating a society of land ownership and military sovereignty over the occupied soil by subdued communities (Lefebvre 2001: 41). Reflections on modernity and globalization have exacerbated this dichotomy, especially through the establishment of a narrow identification of urban space and modernization, on the one hand, and rural settings and traditional values, on the other. According to Lefebvre (2001), the secondary and residual role of the rural element is already present in Marxs reflections on the development of the capitalist system. Rereading Marxs texts, such as the Manuscripts Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1, 1 (2012): 85107

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of 1844, Lefebvre (2001) affirms that inherent in them is a need to overcome the owners personal relationship with propertycharacteristic of the feudal system in the Middle Agesso that land could reach the status of commodity. For Marx, this transition took place with industrialization in England, which gave a new pulse to the town and a new sense to the urbanization of Western modern society. Even recognizing that Marx did not develop this subject at length, Lefebvre sustains that the concept of town in opposition to the countryside is central in Marxs thought, since it has meaning and importance in a social context: the urban reality (Lefebvre 2001: 32). Such opposition can be seen, for instance, in the division of social labour, in which a separation takes place, first, between industrial and commercial work (inside the urban space) and second, between these two activities and agricultural labour (Lefebvre 2001: 39), thus prompting a clear division and opposition between rural land and the city. In his rereading of the German Ideology, Lefebvre is even more incisive, affirming that Marx and Engels have identified the city as the subject of history (Lefebvre 2001: 48). According to him, Marx never dealt clearly with this subject in his works, but in this text, the subject of history is unconditionally the Town (Lefebvre 2001: 49), because the author makes a clear division between the town and rural reality, positing the supremacy of the first over the second, and the need for overcoming such division.2 According to Lefebvre, the countryside, in opposition to the city, is dispersion and isolation. The city, on the other hand, concentrates not only the population but the means of production, capital, the needs, the pleasures. Therefore, everything that makes a society become a society (Lefebvre 2001: 49; authors translation). The separation and opposition between town and countrya result of the social division of labourhas the effect of blocking social totality and relegating work without material intelligence to the countryside (Lefebvre 2001: 49). This separation results in the division of classes and alienation, which consequently should be overcome. The overcoming of this opposition (as a result of the historical process and praxis) is one of the communitys first conditions (Lefebvre 2001: 50). According to Lefebvre (2001: 55), the opposition or dialectical conflict between town and country embraces a certain unity, making difficult the theoretical grasping of the relationship between unity and Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1, 1 (2012): 85107

Land and Territory 89 contradiction. This is the basis of the ambiguity in Marx and Engels when they deal with the end of the city, because industry has already become the subject of historical processes (Lefebvre 2001: 63).3 In summary, Lefebvre (1999) reaffirms that the rural areas have been overcome by Western capitalist urbanity, as the concentration of the population accompanies the means of production. The urban fabric proliferates, increasing its extension and destroying the residues of agrarian life. This expression, the urban fabric, does not relate, in a restricted way, to the domain built in the towns, but to the manifestations of the towns prevalence over the countryside (Lefebvre 1999: 17; authors translation). Based on the premise that capitalist development in post-modernity encompasses all spheres of life (besides nature and the unconscious), Fredric Jameson points to the same direction as Lefebvre, by affirming the overcoming of rural realities once modernization is even relatively completed (Jameson 1998: 66). Differently from the modern period, post-modern society no longer entails the coexistence of uneven worlds (Jameson 1998: 66); thus, he continues, the satisfaction of being absolument moderne is dissipated when modern technologies are everywhere, there are no longer any provinces, and even the past comes to seem like an alternative World (Jameson 1998: 66). Jameson (1998) affirms that there was a complete assimilation of the rural perspective in the process of industrialization of Western society. The implementation of the green revolution (and the industrialization of agriculture) retained an older precapitalist mode of production, keeping agriculture intact, exploiting it in tributary fashion, deriving capital by extensive labour, inhuman hours and conditions, from essentially precapitalist relations (Jameson 1998: 67). The new multinational stage of capital embraced all spheres of life, including agriculture, sweeping away of such enclaves, eliminating differences and turning this same life into a part of industrial exploitation (Jameson 1998: 68). Differently from Lefebvre (1999, 2001), however, Jameson (1998) affirms that this process of capitalist assimilation of agriculture and of nature ends up consuming the other term of the binary opposition. In Jamesons words, the disappearance of Naturethe commodification of the countryside and the capitalization of agriculture itself all over the Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1, 1 (2012): 85107

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worldnow begins to sap its other term, the formerly urban (Jameson 1998: 69), provoking a process of deterioration of urban life. The process of capitalist development in the 1950s and the 1960s forged a concept of progress in a linear relationship with modernization, industrialization and urbanization. Global economic and social development would not permit any alternative except for the growth of industrialization, thereby attracting people to urban agglomerations. Lefebvre (1991) suggests, then, that the essential character of industrial societybeyond the quantitative growth of material productionis the development of the cities or of urban society. In his words, urban life gives meaning to industrialisation, which it contains as a second aspect of the process. It is possible that from a certain critical point (where we can locate ourselves), urbanisation and its problems dominate the process of industrialisation (Lefebvre 1991: 55). Lefebvre states that the remaining perspective for industrial society is to produce urban life in its fullness. If it is not so, than it is only to produce for producing (Lefebvre 1991: 55). The urbanization phenomenon, as a worldwide and inevitable reality (Serageldin 2000), becomes the great adventure of humanity. The city, in opposition to the backwardness of the rural areas, is considered the fundamental space for economic development and the construction of citizenship (Wanderley 2001: 2). Thus, modernization means a historical process of generalization of the urban cultural patterns, which are seen as synonymous to emancipation, autonomy, development, progress and citizenship (Sauer 2010). These conceptions lead to interpretations that affirm the dilution of contradictions and differences between rural and urban spaces (Ianni 1997), since the urban fabric comes to dominate the entire society, as capitalist modernization becomes relatively complete (Jameson 1998). There is no geographical and social space for the existence of tradition, and for different values and ways of life, because urbanity has consumed all residues of agrarian life (Lefebvre 1999). Consequently, according to Octvio Ianni, a Brazilian Marxist scholar,
...for a long time, the town not only overcame but also absorbed the countryside, the agrarian, rural society. There is no longer a contradiction between town and country, as the urban way of life, bourgeois sociability, the culture

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of capitalism, and capitalism as a civilising process are invading, recovering, absorbing, or recreating the countryside with other meanings. (Ianni 1997: 60; authors translation)

This capitalist civilization process encompasses all spheres of life and society, integrating, modernizing and diluting the agrarian world (Jameson 1998; Lefebvre 1991). It loses its characteristics (its economy is no longer based on agricultural activities) and is no longer a place for maintaining and reproducing traditional values, for instance, of communal ways of living. The urbanization of the countryside also brings secularization, individualization and rationalization, destroying the last traces that could differentiate the rural from the urban. Once more, in Iannis words,
What remains is the bucolic element, the nostalgia of nature, the utopia of agrarian, tribal, indigenous, the last, past, remote, imaginary community... Mass-culture itself, activated by the cultural industry, continually reworks the nostalgia of the bucolic utopia. It pasteurises and cannibalises present and past, real and imaginary elements of the agrarian world. It reinvents the countryside, the county, campagna, champ, the interior, deserts, ridges, mountains, rivers, lakes, the green, the ecology, environment and other formulations, which appear in the imaginary of many as substitutes of paradiseutopia. (Ianni 1997: 63; authors translation)

Several objections could be made to these conceptions of rural perspectives and of the current development of the contemporary world. The modernization pattern, for instance, is not something that embraces the entire society in the same way, as affirmed by Jameson (1998).4 For instance, one-third of the worlds farmers, according to Mazoyer and Roudart (2002), do not cultivate land under green revolution technologies, or even use animal traction, nor do they cultivate crop varieties that have been subject to biological improvements. In Brazil, agricultural modernization was implemented in an unequal way, making possible a deep social, economic and political discontinuity, as well as the coexistence of plural and contradictory situations and values, which have resulted from a capitalist production based on non-capitalist relations and forms of exploitation (Martins 1989), even from expropriation, or accumulation by dispossession, following Harvey (2003).

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Land: Between Tradition and Modern Means of Production

In spite of this separation between industry and agriculture, town and countryalways to detriment of the latterthe Brazilian countryside has historically been the stage of territorial disputes. This is not only due to resistance against expropriations, or to popular actions and demands for access to land (the struggle for land), but it has also been made explicit by the actions and causes defended by the organizations of employers and large-scale landowners, which increase the value of the territory, or materialize the incorporation of land by capital (Martins 1994). In spite of the fact that this phenomenon has not been accounted for in many analyses with an essentially modern hue, it expresses a logic of economic growth through expropriation (Sauer 2011), or accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003). The ongoing agro-strategies (Almeida 2011), especially the instruments that allocate new lands to agricultural expansion and the extraction of natural resources (minerals, timber, water, energy), generalize and deepen the process of expropriation, including the traditional riverside, indigenous and extractive communities, resulting in resistances and constant deterritorialization. Such agro-strategies have counted on the support and resources of the state with the single and exclusive goal of producing agricultural, forest and mineral commodities for export (Almeida 2011; Sauer 2011). These agro-strategies have materialized through the denial of the territorial rights of peoples and communities that occupy and dwell in the countryside (Sauer 2011). The presence of such populations and their struggles for recognition and respect for rights are seen and announced as obstructions to progress and development, which in turn are seen as public goods, and as universal in opposition to the local and particular. The historical forms of land appropriation and use lose their social function, to be measured against an allegedly universal necessity of land use, for instance, as a fundamental means for the production of food (Sauer 2011). Despite the discourse of public goods, the practice has always been one of undue and illegal appropriation of (public) lands and collective or communal territories. In the attempt to appropriate the available pockets

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Land and Territory 93 of land, the agro-strategies expand and deepen the use of illegal mechanisms, such as land grabbing, that is, the transfer of public land and common territories to the private domain (Sauer 2011), both for the purposes of real estate speculation and for the production of commodities. In disputes for land, and their ideological mechanisms of justification, the resistance and struggles of landless families and traditional communities assume fundamentally contested meanings. The notion of place as the geographic source of meaning is transformed into a spatial refuge (Massey 2008: 24). However, while this latter notion becomes a theoretical tool for political explanations (resistance to expropriation, for instance), it is also been construed as a conservative counterpoint to the drive towards total universalization (or globalization, capitalism). It has been noted by Massey (2008: 25) that this conception of place is frequently mobilized and transformed into a place of denial, or the attempt to remove difference, thus becoming a refuge with conservative political meaning. However, such a construal of struggles for placeas a hermetically closed space, of denial of differencesreinforces a distorted interpretation of the struggle for territory by landless families, by quilombola communities and riverside and indigenous peoples. By opposing the place (the local element) and globalization (or universalization), such struggles for territory are then categorized as conservative reactions, as they materialize the resistance of traditional communities which are unwilling to accept changes and resist development (or improvement) brought about by progress and globalization (Massey 2008; Sauer 2011). In the resistances against expropriation and for the right to territory, the opposition between universal and local is reinforced by concepts and notions such as ancestry, but especially by the constant appeal to tradition. Obviously, it is used as a static and frozen notion. In other words, it is seen only as a set of unchanging and immobilized socio-cultural codes in opposition to the movement of progress and to the constant changeable nature of modernity (Giddens 1991). Despite the frequent linkages between land and identity (Sauer 2002, 2011), the emphasis regarding the right to territory tends to fall on the reproduction of traditional means of life, that is, on tradition. Such tradition is seen as a counterpoint to modernity, progress and (rural) development. In other words, the fight for territory becomes restricted to traditional communities, as a fight for backwardness, especially when Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1, 1 (2012): 85107

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the disputed areas are located in regions of agribusiness expansion, like, in the Amazon (Almeida 2011). The legal Brazilian definition of territory does not sustain such excessive emphasis on tradition, nor does it authorize static understandings of the latter. The definition is focused on difference and on the recognition of rights based on criteria of precedence and ancestry. Thus, a presidential decree defines traditional peoples and communities as:
culturally differentiated groups that recognise themselves as such, with their own forms of social organisation, occupying and using territories and natural resources as a condition for their cultural, social, religious, ancestral and economic reproduction, and using the knowledge, the innovations and practices that have been created and transmitted through tradition. (Brasil 2007: Decree 6040, Article 3, Incision I; authors translation)

The key element of the definition of traditional community is the selfdefinition or self-recognition as a socially differentiated group with an identity of its own and a close relation to a specific territory and land. Self-definition, in the sense of declaring a social identity, is a fundamental criterion for the recognition of territorial rights. This is clear in the first article of Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO), as well as in Brazilian legislation; thus, the self-determination criterion must be accepted as a conquest of citizenship by quilombola and riverside communities, extractors of coconut and other resources, indigenous peoples and other emerging collective holders of rights (Sauer 2011). Therefore, from a conceptual standpoint, it is essential to reject the notion of a traditional community as a socio-cultural group in opposition to notions of progress and development. It is also fundamental to reject the distinction, or even the opposition, between the notion of space, seen as universal, global and abstract element, and of place understood as the concrete, closed, coherent, integrated and homogenous setting (Massey 2008: 25). Such distinction is misleading, as the places (and territories) in question are not homogenous, or even the material basis of immutable socio-cultural practices. Instead, they are spaces that admit diversity. Bourdieu (1998) affirms that the establishment of frontiers is a legitimate social and political definition resulting from struggles for the power to see and make believe. Accordingly, frontiers are the product

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Land and Territory 95 of a division to which one will ascribe the status of a stronger or weaker foundation of reality, and are the product of socio-cultural differences (Bourdieu 1998: 114; authors translation). These frontiers yield specific traits to a region (or to territory) and to a place,5 establishing divisions of the social world and producing identities (Bourdieu 1996), but this does not necessarily imply isolationism or an aversion to the other or the different (Sauer 2010). Under this conception of territory, the key concern is the appropriation, the use and the (real and symbolic) construction of space by the populations that dwell in ittherefore, space as a product of human interrelations, based on the realities of plurality and multiplicity (Massey 2008). Such a notion is also present in Convention 169 of the ILO and in Brazilian law, which defines traditional territories as the necessary spaces for the cultural, social, and economic reproduction of traditional peoples and communities, either on a permanent or temporary basis (Brasil 2007). Consequently, traditional populations have a right to the territory because such territory is understood as the place of life and of the preservation of identity; this definition does not relate to the productive ends of the land (as a reduction or simplification of the notion for social function). In such a context, it is necessary to problematize the distinction between the notions of land and territory. If the latter is implicitly or explicitly understood as the place of life, the former has always been associated to the category of a means (and place) of production. Among other reasons, the reduction of land to a means of production (and the consequent impoverishment of the territorial struggles) is a result of the introduction of the concept of productive land in the 1988 Brazilian constitution as a mechanism to block advancements in the democratization of landed property (Martins 1994). There is a reductionist reading of the constitutional text, which emphasizes that a productive property cannot be expropriated for the ends of agrarian reform (Article 185, Incision II). By restricting the notion of social function of the land to its economic dimensionthat is, its productivity, which is the sole criterion for land expropriation for the purpose of agrarian reformit increased the distance between the notions of land (as a means and a place of production) and territory (as a place of identity, self-recognition and historical

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occupation). Such a distinction has yielded different meanings to the struggles for land (which are frequently seen only as occupations of unproductive lands) and for territory (as in the resistance of traditional populations against the invasion of their lands). Accordingly, social struggles for land become restricted to struggles for access to land and the execution of agrarian reform, quite apart from claims and struggles for territorial rights. The land struggle is constantly restricted to claims for access to a means of production and, by extension, to work (Martins 1994).6 The land struggle is not a struggle for rights like housing (a place to live) and identity (right to be peasant, rural worker or family-based producer), but only for production and, at most, for the right to work (Sauer 2010). The right of the family-based producers is not justified by the need to be and to reproduce socially (or by a consciousness of being, in terms of ILO Convention 169), but only by the production factor (Sauer 2011). However, as Almeida (2011) points out, the self-recognition of traditional communities and peoples is intimately linked to historical practices in the use of the land, and has proved itself as a mobilizing inspiration and a political force. These historical practices are nourished by tradition, but they also re-signify it and therefore, they do not provide proof for any static type of understanding of itas historically located in the past. The appropriation of tradition is also a motor in the establishment of collective identities, including the so-called identities of emerging subjects. The struggle for land and territory becomes a political, social and cultural struggle for the construction and attainment of citizenship by rural populations (Martins 1994). It is taking place as a spatial praxis of emancipation (Soja 1993) and as a social process of reinvention of rural areas in Brazil (Sauer 2010). The struggle for land and territory following Aug (1994) on the notion of place as identitarian, relational, and historicalmaterializes the search for a geographically located and delimited place, thus recasting the dimension of spatiality (Sauer 2010: 59). According to Martins (2000: 4647), the settlements are a true reinvention of the society as a clear reaction to perverse effects of the excluding development and of modernity itself, bringing new elements and perspectives into rural life. This spatial praxis of emancipation (Soja 1993) is done by social and political alliances and mobilizations against the concentration of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1, 1 (2012): 85107

Land and Territory 97 agrarian property and large estates, which historically represent the instrument and locus for the exercise of power and dominance. Beyond their lack of economic efficiency, these large estates areas promoters of geographical displacement and rural exodussymbols, instruments and places of social exclusion and political marginalization. Great extensions of private lands are socially empty territories, and non-places (Aug 1994), generating a rurality of empty spaces (Wanderley 2001), which means places of absence and emptiness of identity for millions of landless peasants and violation of rights of rural communities. In summary, there is a social and political movement of recreating the countryside and the rural areas through the struggle for land and territory in Brazil (Martins 2000). The social movementsborn of the resistance to the expropriation and exploitation of the rural populations by the advance of agricultural modernizationbring back the importance of land and territory under a broader perspective, especially in relation to territorial rights and to the rights of being peasants and rural communities. This struggle embraces transformations in the countryside, redistributing landownership and political power, redirecting and democratizing the participation of the rural population in the Brazilian society.

Land as a Place of Work, Abundance, Living and Dwelling

The experiences of struggle and access to landbesides guaranteeing social well-being and the improvement of life conditions (Stdile 1997)are also motors of cultural, symbolic and representational transformations.7 The struggle for land and territory cannot be understood as a return to the past, nor as an attempt to preserve bucolic traces (Ianni 1997) or of building an agrarian communitarian utopia (Carvalho 2002). The struggle for territory and access to land is producing historical subjects (that is, a ruralship8 of autonomous people) who do not allow this struggle to be categorized as an archaic social or anti-modern movement (Massey 2008). This struggle (and its symbolic construction) transforms the land into a place for life; a home capable of welcoming and giving meaning to Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1, 1 (2012): 85107

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existence. Differently from a modern displacement of space from a place (Giddens 1991), land is represented as a geographically located place, where it is possible to work and to dwell. The fundamental goal of landless peasants is to conquer their own land (Carvalho 1999: 15). This conquest is understood as an indispensible condition in order to accomplish what Van der Ploeg (2008) called the project of autonomy, with a special emphasis on working for oneself (Godi 2000: 2). The possibility of work becomes a reality with access to land, thereby producing several symbolic meanings for it.9 Labour is the most important real and symbolic value in the process of struggle for survival and in the resistance to exploitation, which is the search for the promised land. The right to work is central in this process of struggle and construction of representations, since it explains and justifies the landless peasants reality and actions. The conquest of land is a blessing or a gift of grace, mediated by work that makes land productive. The search for work is a direct result of the experiences and realities of unemployment, underemployment and low incomes. People look for the means to overcome unemployment or the condition of exploitation, by creating alternatives, while the dream of the promised land is a fundamental perspective capable of guaranteeingthrough work and productionthe survival and the continuity of life. First of all, to be free, that is, to accomplish the project of autonomy, means to fulfil the right to work. Access to land is the real possibility of becoming a worker, of having work as a central element in ones ontological constitution as a being.10 Globalization, along with technological change, may have modified the character and centrality of work for most of the population, but it did not fulfil the concepts and representations of labour held by the landless peasants. This desire or dream of a working place is not fulfilled in every kind of work. In other words, land means more than a simple job or a possibility of earning some money. Land represents an alternative to unemployment and to the low income of the daily paid jobs, but it is not reduced to that. The search and struggle are not merely aimed at any kind of job, but at free work. Consequently, the access to land means work and freedom, especially because it makes it possible to work for oneself, to produce in abundance and secure conditions for the social reproduction of the household. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1, 1 (2012): 85107

Land and Territory 99 The desire for freedom and autonomy is very explicit in the words and dreams of the landless peasants, establishing a direct relationship between access to land and the search for free work. The central purpose of the struggle for landthe search for a plot of landis a fight for the right to work. Land is understood and represented as a means and place of work, capable of providing survival and reproduction for the family (Martins 1989), and accessing it is a necessary condition for freedom and for an autonomous production. Antunes establishes a direct connection between work and freedom, because, through work, the social being is self-produced as humankind (Antunes 1999: 145). This process of self-activity and self-control moves the social being onto the production and reproduction of oneself as humankind (Antunes 1999: 145). Thus, access to land is a necessary condition for the right to work, especially because the plot of land is the place of working par excellence (Woortmann and Woortmann 1997: 27). The fulfilment of this right is the path for the self-representation and constitution of the peasants identity as free workers. According to Woortmann and Woortmann, to be a dweller, to be a landowner is a fundamental condition for being free, together with the domain of cognitive and symbolic knowledge which guides the process of working (Woortmann and Woortmann 1997: 44). Free work is an activity without the constraints and difficulties of daily paid work. It is an activity undertaken without the orders and commands of a boss. To be free is to labour under no other persons command. Above all, this freedom comes about through ones labour power, with the domain and control of ones own body and time. Second, free work means to control the whole productive process, because there is no real distinction between the means (including knowledge) and results of production. The importance ascribed to the control or possession of production (to being its owner) is directly related or perceived as a natural result of the conquered land.11 As a result of human action and of the lands gift, production is the medium for social recognition. Thus, society recognizes settled families as workers and producers. However, production shall be under the control of the people who work and produce, as a condition of differentiation from previous situations of exploitation (daily paid jobs) and/or expropriation (the obligation of fractioning the production with a landowner). Consequently, the production provides meaning to work and is Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1, 1 (2012): 85107

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the condition for an individual to become a subject (social recognition) and free (to possess the results of ones own work). The desire for a life with abundance is part of the dreams of the landless peasants. The production of foodstuff materializes this new condition, differently from the previous situation. Production and abundance are direct results of an interaction between free work (autonomous and productive work, work with meaning) and the fertile land. This interaction between land and work must primarily produce food, thus securing a situation without hunger or deprivation of daily meals. No matter how difficult it is for peasants to be or to live in the settlements, access to land is seen as a new reality, as a bountiful table, and as a possibility for the reproduction of the family and its values (Martins 2000). Freedom and autonomy are central elements of modern concepts and values in the process of constitution of new political subjects. The implication is that people can build their own biographies (Giddens 1991). The struggle for land, as a struggle for freedom, constitutes subjects and brings about citizenship in the countryside, because it creates possibilities and capacities for peasants to become subjects of their own destinies (Beck 1999), as free workers who own and control the fruit of their work. The concern with production contrasts with interpretations of Western capitalist society, based on the logic that emphasizes the reproduction of capital (Jameson 1997). For peasants representations, work and its results are central in the construction of meaningful life. Work is still fundamental in the constitution and representation of social identity, and production is central as a means of life and a future guarantee of the basic condition of social reproduction. However, land is not only represented as a means or instrument for working and producing. Social mobilization processes and symbolic constructions also locate land as a place for living and dwelling, a home capable of welcoming and bringing meaning into existence. Contrary to the processes of displacement of space (Giddens 1991), land is represented as a space that reinforces local bonds and the sense of belonging to a certain place, constituting a new process of territorialization that geographically places people in a delimited space, materializing an identitarian, relational and historical place (Aug 1997).

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Land and Territory 101 This perspectivein a process of constructing alternatives for todays reality of displacementallows us to interpret the land struggle as a search for and a construction of heterotopias (Foucault 1984), leading to the constitution of other places, simultaneously real and symbolic, which contest the established values and tendencies of homogeneity of space of contemporary Western society (Foucault 1984). Thus, land and territory become these other places, meaning qualitatively distinct places that simultaneously reproduce and build alternatives to the spatial practices of the contemporary Western society. The search for a location only reflects the importance of the spatial dimension, as belongingness, or the status of the place as space for exercising ones full existence (Santos 2001: 114), in the real and symbolic construction of being, a coming-to-be that means being in a place. In this sense, Santos defines place as:
the frame of a pragmatic reference to the world, from which follow requests and precise orders of conditioned actions, but it is also the irreplaceable stage of human passions, responsible through communicative action for the most different manifestations of spontaneity and creativity. (Santos 1997: 258; authors translation)

This category of place appears in the representations of peasants, resulting from a life marked by geographical mobility in the search for survival. The displacements and travelling, differently from Maffesolis (2001) concepts, are seen, felt and represented as synonymous for insecurity and lack of perspectives. Peasants displace themselves searching for jobs and for the possibility of newly settling themselves, materializing thereby the ideal of safety, because these elements establish a point of reference (an address) and a geographical location that generates the perspective of belongingness (Ortiz 1997), an existential place. The concern with security refers not only to an immediate struggle but also to the desire to conquer a place capable of securing a future, in terms of social reproduction (sustaining and raising a family) and to the existential perspective of a pension for future retirement. The search for a secure future includes the representation of land as a means and a place capable of sustaining life even in a situation of incapacity for working.

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Land is also seen as an existential safety, as the retirement guarantee of a calm life for elderly peasants. The peasants venture in the struggle for land because it represents a guarantee of present and future sustenance, independently of the conditions of production and work. Thus, land becomes an existential perspective of social security. Certainly, this desire is more evident for the oldest peasants, but it reveals different symbolic dimensions of the social processes of land struggle. The symbolic conquest of land becomes an existential process that includes the right to work, but also the appropriation of the outcomes of such work. The new situation also includes the certainty of a future through self-sustainability, social reproduction and peace for the older generations. Land also represents an opportunity for savings, which would guarantee safety and retirement at old age. These conceptions of landnot only as an instrument or a means of work but also as a place of social reproduction and belongingrestore the meaning of territory as part of a complex social organization beyond a simple physical base for sustaining social relations. The notion of territory encompasses the concepts, representations and lived experiences in a geographically located place, allowing the symbolic construction of rurality. It results from a social and political process that locates histories, struggles and adventures in the search for a place to live, to work, to produce and to reproduce.

Conclusion
Brazil has experienced processes of popular resistance and struggle for land and territory, which have provoked a reinvention or recreation of the countryside. The dream of possessing a place for living, dwelling and working has led hundreds of thousands of landless families to engage in a movement of return to the countryside. Such dreams are also the driving forces behind the resistance of rural communities against expropriation, recreating the very notion of struggle for land, including territorial rights, as a right to be. Consequently, land does not mean only the physical sustainability of human life. It is a territory having real political, economic and social perspective, but also a symbolic meaning. Land is life, therefore a place Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1, 1 (2012): 85107

Land and Territory 103 for production and social reproduction. The struggle of the landless peasants and rural communities is a fight for a heterotopia (Foucault 1984), a fight for another place, a qualitatively distinct place of resistance to deterritorialization processes, forced by the agricultural model implemented in Brazil. The struggles for land and territorial rightsand also for education, work and infrastructureare incorporating other elements and values that enable processes of sustainable development, of improvement of life conditions and environmental preservation. The whole process of mobilization and struggle for land and territory constitutes an expansion of modernity towards the countryside, re-signifying collective identities, yet with values and perspectives that are distinct from the current pattern of technological and productive agricultural modernization. Under globalization, the land struggle materializes the struggle for a place, the search for better life conditions (citizenship) and the right to work, transforming conquests into processes of appropriation of territories: a new process of territorialization. The ongoing mobilizations, articulations and struggles ascribe to rural organizations the status of vanguard social and political agents. Such agency also represents a pedagogical process that transforms peasants into actors and subjects of their own biographies. The mobilizations and struggles for land create subjects and transform rural realities, allowing the emergence of a new rurality. Based on values and perspectives that are different from those of the current pattern of modernization and development, this rurality is constituted in the materialization of modernity in the Brazilian countryside. Therefore, the land struggle is a passage towards modernity, as it implies both real and symbolic changes that affect the conditions of life, production and the relationship with nature in the Brazilian countryside.

Notes
1. This article is partly based on the theoretical discussion and field research undertaken for the authors doctoral thesis; see Sauer (2002, 2010). 2. According to Soja, Lefebvres concerns extended beyond an understanding or a defence of the city, because urbanization was a summarized metaphor

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for the spatiality of modernity and the strategic planning of daily life, which had allowed the successful survival and reproduction of capitalism, and of its essential relations of production (Soja 1993: 65; authors translation). 3. Lefebvre states that there is a gap in the thought of Marx and Engels, as they did not explore the city as a place of birth, social framework and the condition of a sequence of ideologies and knowledge... (Lefebvre 2001: 65; authors translation). 4. Instead of opposing the two terms of the equation, another approach is to understand the recent transformations as a process of eliminating frontiers between rural and urban settings, transforming each into an extension of the other. Therefore, there is no opposition between them, or even the encroachment of one by the other, but a continuum of urban and rural realities, and complementary social, economic and cultural perspectives. However, most scholars who adopt this interpretation tend to affirm the dominance of the urban perspective. 5. Bourdieu (1998) worked with a notion of region in a historical moment when the concept of territory did not have a sociological hue. 6. This linkage between land and right to work (Martins 1994) is the only one that applies to the right to land by rural populations and landless peasants not defined as traditional populations. 7. The biographical reports of landless peasants are true itineraries of displacements in search of survival. These space syntaxes (Certeau 2000) reveal desires, images, dreams and representations of social and political reality in the struggle for land, influenced by larger processes of transformations in Brazilian society. 8. The very concept of citizenship is directly related to the city and its possibilities. Therefore, the use of this concept for rural people becomes a real contradiction. 9. Martins (1989) made a distinction between land for selling or exchange and land for labouring, removing the classic notion of private property from the second concept and establishing a distinction between the notions of landownership and land tenure (possession). Accordingly, the land struggle cannot be frivolously confused with a struggle for the defense of property and the current status of property rights in society. It is, above all, a clear struggle for land to labour (Martins 1989: 100; authors translation). 10. According to Antunes, having an ontological role in the constitution of the social being, because it changes its nature and transforms oneself, work has in its genesis and in its development, in its being-to-be and in its comingto-be, an ontological intention turned into a process of mans humanisation in its wider sense (Antunes 1999: 142; authors translation; italics in original).

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11. In subjective terms, land is seen as neither a working tool nor a merchandize, as it is taken as the expression of a morality, not in its external aspect as a factor of production, but as something thought and represented in the context of an effective value-appreciation. Land is not seen as a space of nature on which the work of a domestic group is done, but as a familys patrimony on which work is done for building the family as a value (Woortmann 1990: 12).

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